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Cypriot Greek phonology
Studies of the phonology of Cypriot Greek are few and tend to examine very specific phenomena, e.g. gemination, "glide hardening". A general overview of the phonology of Cypriot Greek has only ever been attempted once, by , but parts of it are now contested. Consonants Cypriot Greek possesses geminate and palato-alveolar consonants, which are lacking from Standard Modern Greek, as well as a trill, which is present but does not contrast with in Standard Modern Greek. The table below, adapted from , depicts the consonantal inventory of Cypriot Greek. Consonants enclosed in parentheses are presumed to be allophones. Stops and affricate are unaspirated and may be pronounced weakly voiced in fast speech. are always heavily aspirated and they are never preceded by nasals, with the exception of some loans, e.g. "shampoo". and are laminal post-alveolars. is pronounced similarly to , in terms of closure duration and aspiration. Voiced fricatives are often pronounced as approximants and they are regularly elided when intervocalic. is similarly often realised as an approximant The palatal lateral approximant is most often realised as a singleton or geminate lateral or a singleton or geminate fricative , and sometimes as a glide (cf. yeismo). The circumstances under which all the different variants surface are not very well understood, but appear to be favoured in stressed syllables and word-finally, and before . identifies the following phonological and non-phonological influencing factors: stress, preceding vowel, following vowel, position inside word; and sex, education, region, and time spent living in Greece (where is standard). notes that speakers of some local varieties, notably that of Larnaca, "substitute" the geminate fricative for , but contests this, saying that, " is robustly present in the three urban areas of Lefkosia, Lemesos and Larnaka as well as the rural Kokinohoria region, especially among teenaged speakers ... the innovative pronunciation is not a feature of any local patois, but rather a supra-local feature." The palatal nasal is produced somewhat longer than other singleton nasals, though not as long as geminates. is similarly "rather long". The alveolar trill is the geminate counterpart of the tap . Palatalisation and glide hardening In analyses that posit a phonemic (but not phonetic) glide , palatals and postalveolars arise from CJV (consonant–glide–vowel) clusters, namely: V → V * V → V * V → V or V * V → V or V * V → V or V * V → V * V → V * V → V }} The glide is not assimilated, but hardens to an obstruent after and to after . At any rate, velar stops and fricatives are in complementary distribution with palatals and postalveolars before front vowels ; that is to say, broadly, are palatalised to either or ; to çː}} or ; and to . Geminates There is considerable disagreement on how to classify Cypriot Greek geminates, though they are now generally understood to be "geminates proper" (rather than clusters of identical phonemes or "fortis" consonants). Geminates are 1.5 to 2 times longer than singletons, depending, primarily, on position and stress. Geminates occur both word-initially and word-medially. Word-initial geminates tend to be somewhat longer. have found that "for stops, in particular, this lengthening affects both closure duration and VOT", but claim that stops contrast only in aspiration, and not duration. is distinctively long (or geminate). The CGasp system contains simply tense aspirated and lax unaspirated stops."}} undertook a perceptual study with thirty native speakers of Cypriot Greek, and has found that both closure duration and (the duration and properties of) aspiration provide important cues in distinguishing between the two kinds of stops, but aspiration is slightly more significant. Assimilatory processes Word-final assimilates with succeeding consonants—other than stops and affricates—at word boundaries producing post-lexical geminates. Consequently, geminate voiced fricatives, though generally not phonemic, do occur as allophones. Below are some examples of geminates to arise from sandhi. * → "Lucas" (acc.) * → "he is here" * → "from the root" In contrast, singleton stops and affricates do not undergo gemination, but become fully voiced when preceded by a nasal, with the nasal becoming homorganic. This process is not restricted to terminal nasals; singleton stops and affricates always become voiced following a nasal. * → "we smoke cigars" * → "even though" * → "on Sunday" Word-final is altogether elided before geminate stops and consonant clusters: * → "we bought flowers" * → "on the head" Like with , word-final assimilates to following and producing geminates: * → "let it snow" Lastly, word-final becomes voiced when followed by a voiced consonant belonging to the same phrase: * → "of Malta" * → "race" Vowels of Cypriot Greek. Adapted from .]] Cypriot Greek has a five-vowel system /|}} similar to that of Standard Modern Greek. Back vowels following at the end of an utterance are regularly reduced (50% of all cases presented in study) to "fricated vowels" (40% of all cases, cf. Slavic yers), and are sometimes elided altogether (5% of all cases). In glide-less analyses, may alternate with or , e.g. "cage" → "cages", or "koulouri" → "koulouria"; and, like in Standard Modern Greek, it is pronounced when found between and another vowel that belongs to the same syllable, e.g. "one" (f.). Stress Cypriot Greek has "dynamic" stress. Both consonants and vowels are longer in stressed than in unstressed syllables, and the effect is stronger word-initially. There is only one stress per word, and it can fall on any of the last four syllables. Stress on the fourth syllable from the end of a word is rare and normally limited to certain verb forms. Because of this possibility, however, when words with antepenultimate stress are followed by an enclitic in Cypriot Greek, no extra stress is added (unlike Standard Modern Greek, where the stress can only fall on one of the last three syllables), e.g. Cypriot Greek , Standard Modern Greek "my bicycle".